Curious Kittens

For years I cherished my earliest memory. And then the truth came out and made me question everything.

My father comes down the stairs holding a large cardboard box. I’m five years old, sitting on the factory floor, waiting for him. I don’t why I’m there, on the cold concrete surrounded by the aroma of astringent chemicals and the creaking, clanking, whistling of the machines at rest. It’s past knock-off time: the workers have left and taken with them their shuffling feet and the sounds of community. We are alone, my father and me. The main overhead lights are off, so as he descends, he is backlit by the fluorescent lights of the staircase behind him. The big cardboard box in his hands bears the branding of something I know to be electronic, maybe it’s from a TV or a HIFI system. It is 1990 and my father is in his prime: tall and handsome with thick black hair. He is the gentlest person I know. My bare legs are folded beneath me. I remember the soft, pale yellow of my shoes with the white laces. He sets the box down and I glimpse his freckled wrist beneath that thick silver watch which he will wear for another twenty-four years. He grins. He has brought something; a surprise just for me. I peer inside the box and see about five or six kittens. They are black and white and brown and speckled, with diamond faces, soft pointy ears, and dark round eyes. They are everything I have ever wanted. My chest threatens to burst. I feel an awe and wonder that years later, I will call love.

My father strokes my hair. “I found them living out near the bins behind the factory,” he says. “You can look after them, for a while, until we find them new homes.”

We drive along the highway, back to my mother’s house, with the kittens safely on the backseat, purring and meowing along to the songs playing on the radio.

This is my earliest memory. But, as it turns out, it is a memory of something that never actually happened.

It is thirty years later, and my father has died. I am having coffee with my mother; we are talking about the past. This is the only subject we allow ourselves to discuss because to talk about the present would mean facing too much; the unavoidable truth that neither of us are the women we hoped the other would be. Instead, we play the game of remember when.

It is my turn. “Remember when we had those kittens. What happened to them?” I ask.

She frowns. “What kittens?”

“The kittens that Dad found at the factory. We brought them back in a cardboard box. Did we rehome them? I can’t remember anything about them after he dropped us off that night.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.” She shakes her head, amused. “We never had any kittens. We’re both allergic.”

I sit back and stare into my empty cup. “You mean, I made it up? I invented a box of kittens?”

“You must have,” she says, making that scribbling sign in the air for the waiter to bring the bill.

When I tell my friend about this, she looks at me with something like benevolent sadness. “That’s a false memory. You must have had some psychological need that wasn’t being met. What was going on at that time?”

I shake my head, laughing. “They had just got divorced. It makes sense, I guess. But I swear, for my whole life, I thought he gave me those kittens. I remember it all in sharp detail, in high definition.”

“See,” she says with a shrug. “You were meant to be a writer.”

I sigh and rest my chin on my hand. “Or a fantasist,” I counter.

On the train home, I google false memories. They’re a thing, it turns out. We know the human mind can create them but, like all great mysteries, scientists cannot explain why or how.

For some days after I am haunted by suspicion of my own mind. I find myself needing to be around others so that reality can feel knowable, firm, a fact. When I’m alone in the world, on a bus for instance, or at the supermarket, it’s like I need a witness. Do you see that old woman? Is that child real? How many cars are at the traffic light? The world seems to be that peculiar brand of uncanny: the same but different. Like when you visit someone’s house and they’ve rearranged the furniture.

Now that am I pushing forty, when I drink too much, I blackout. Alcohol it turns out, interrupts the memory process. Things happen but your brain, sauced up, cannot record the details. On mornings after, the night before is sketchy – like an inner-city bridge that has run out of funding, half-built, leading nowhere. This feels dangerous, and unnerving sure – the precipice of oblivion – but I wonder, which is worse, not remembering or not knowing which memory is real and which is not?

I second guess the past now that I am no longer so certain of the difference between lived experience and invented fiction. Who is this unreliable narrator, this hijacker, this author who sees from inside this meatsuit and calls the sky blue and the moon bright? How much of my past is some compulsive fever dream – a chaotic attempt at order, a mind reeling to assert its mark on life? All I know is who I have been, who I thought I was – a woman who knows her own mind.

Memory, they tell us, is unreliable and the truth is stranger than fiction. But curiosity has risks. I am proof; how curious that one innocent question has so cruelly killed off my once-beloved kittens.